Down Robin Hood Chase

Image: © John Sutton Taken: 1 Jul 2015

In 1833 a Select Committee on Public Walks recommended the creation of “properly regulated” public walks for the “middle and humbler classes” in order to improve “their cleanliness, neatness and personal appearance” and provide a venue for a man to show off his wife and well-behaved children. Such walks were seen as an alternative to the “drinking shops, where, in short-lived excitement, they may forget their toil, but where they waste the means of their families and too often destroy their health”. It became possible to implement these recommendations after the 1845 Enclosure Act, and by 1852 walks and other green spaces had been established in an arc north of the town centre, from Robin Hood Chase in the east, along Corporation Oaks and Elm Avenue to the Arboretum and the General Cemetery. The Forest recreation ground was also established. A journalist then wrote that “Nottingham might vie with any town in England for its well-grown and well-dressed women of the operative classes who on Sunday throng the park and public walks.” (All of this information comes from “The transformation of green space in old and new Nottingham” in Volume 118 of the Transactions of the Thoroton Society.)

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